I have recently been working on a project where we need to load and transform data held in Excel 2007 into a SQL Server database. The Excel sheets were fairly complex and had different structures. Fortunately, SSIS 2008 provides some good tools to handle this situation. Lessons learned 1. It is possible to read the…

This question came up today: how can I change the IP address between the principal and mirror in database mirroring? Not a common operation but this procedure worked in an isolated lab environment where we had full control over the application and transaction activity. We wanted to introduce a WAN latency injector so needed to…

I haven’t had a chance to look through these yet so I can’t comment on the content but I thought I would post here to share these new resources. HP Business Intelligence Sizer for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/us/en/sizers/microsoft-sql-bi.html HP Whitepapers on SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-5263ENW.pdf http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/getdocument.aspx?docname=4AA2-8173ENW.pdf http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-7162ENW.pdf

I often see questions about transactional replication performance problems, especially around latency/delays between the publisher and subscriber(s) so I’ve put a few pointers below on what to investigate. Latency between the publisher, distributor and subscriber(s) is, more often than not, the symptom of other causes for example, poor I/O capacity on subscribers, blocking/locking, hotspots on…

We recently had the opportunity to test a couple of the Fusion IO PCI-Express 640GB SSD cards http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx in a Dell R900 server, unfortunately time was against us and we were unable to do this. The Fusion IO SSD cards would dramatically increase the IOPS capacity and personally, I think they would be suited to…

Only just noticed that a new revision of the SQL Server 2008 Books Online documentation has been published, the download is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=765433f7-0983-4d7a-b628-0a98145bcb97&DisplayLang=en

I find it frustrating that the SQL Server 2005/2008 default trace is continually overwritten and there is no way to store x number of files or x MBs of data. As a workaround, I developed an SSIS package to monitor the \LOG folder and automatically archive the default trace file whenever a new file is…

In case you missed the Tech-Ed 2009 announcement, you can find the info here http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/MDS.aspx “On initial scoping, it was determined that ‘Bulldog’ would ship as part of Microsoft Office SharePoint in the O14 wave. At TechEd 2009, we announced a change in packaging for the new MDM capabilities. Project ‘Bulldog’ will now ship as…

After a few late nights, some coffee and a few review cycles, a new article has just been published on the SQLCAT site which provides an overview of the subscriber initialisation techniques for transactional replication and, more specifically using an array-based snapshot http://sqlcat.com/technicalnotes/archive/2009/05/04/initializing-a-transactional-replication-subscriber-from-an-array-based-snapshot.aspx